News & Previews

Encore Michigan said today that plans to coordinate unified general auditions for the state’s professional theater community for this spring have been postponed. "We hoped we could schedule a general audition for this May, but it turned out to be too late in the casting season to benefit many Michigan theaters," said David Kiley, publisher and editor-in-chief of Encore Michigan. "Instead, theaters and actors from across the state should plan to attend unified general auditions sometime in February 2016."
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Breakdancing squids, telekinetic sharks and singing rhinocorns (that’s a cross between a rhino and a unicorn, of course) are just a few of the circus acts that students imagined through dramatic play. Krista Schafer Ewbank, artistic director of Open Book Theatre Company, was a guest in seven downriver classrooms this March.
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Werewolves, robots, damnation: Puzzle Piece Theatre's third season packs a punch. Puzzle Piece Theatre is expanding for the company's third season – the group will be offering three productions for the first time. "Last year both of our productions received the largest audiences we have had, and both were profitable" said producing artistic director D.B. Schroeder. "What we were hearing as audiences were leaving the theater was a strong desire to shorten the wait between our productions..."
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The Detroit theatre community lost one of its most stalwart members this month when Charlotte Leisinger, 72, died from cancer. A life-long Detroiter, Charlotte was a "true person of the theatre," according to Ray Schultz, one of her close friends and colleagues. "I first met Charlotte when I was a member of the Hilberry acting company. Not only was she supremely talented as an actor, director, and stage manager, she was also an enormous lover of theatre and actors..."
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Go Comedy! will bring its award winning All Star Showdown to downtown Detroit April 18 and May 16 at The Elizabeth Theatre located above the Park Bar at 2040 Park Ave, Detroit, MI 48226. Tickets for these special Downtown Detroit pop up performances of The Go Comedy! All Star Showdown are $15 and are on sale now. "Since opening in Ferndale more than six years ago we have been building a tremendous audience with support from all areas in Metro Detroit," states Go Comedy! co-owner Pj Jacokes.
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The Michigan Shakespeare Festival inspires and entertains a diverse audience while further developing an appreciation for professional performances of Shakespeare's works and other classical plays. Michigan Shakespeare Festival's 2015 Season will perform at two locations; their season includes A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, and The Rivals. As the Official Shakespeare Festival of the State of Michigan, the Michigan Shakespeare Festival is dedicated to producing world-class classical plays.
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Are you a subscriber of EncoreMichigan.com's FREE, twice-weekly e-newsletter, Curtain's Up? If not, you don't know what you're missing – including special discount ticket offers from many of the state's professional theaters made only to readers of Curtain's Up! So how can you subscribe? Click "continue" for full details!
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Did you know that EncoreMichigan.com is on Facebook? So if you're a Facebook user, why not find us and follow us on Facebook? By clicking the "like" button at the top of the page, you'll become one of the hundreds of our friends who receive instantaneous notification when our reviews (and those of the New Monitor) are posted online, or when there's breaking professional theater news you need to know!
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Reviews

In any relationship, a delicate balance of personalities is important. In The Kiss of the Sun for Pardon, playwright Lans Traverse shows that however far the teeter may totter there remains a calm at the center. The Detroit Repertory Theatre here is producing the U.S. premiere of this new endearing dramatic comedy. Living isolated on his rural property near Cherokee, OK, T-Bone (Todd Hissong) is set in his ways. He has his orchids and coupon collection. What he doesn’t have is full mobility.
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Playwright J.C. Lee’s recent drama, “Luce,” investigates how a single incident, or a sliver of information, can call into question everything parents thought they knew about their child. In the Michigan premiere production now at Meadow Brook Theatre, director Travis W. Walter hopes to send the viewer reeling into gray areas of cloudy intent and raw uncertainty. The story revolves around ace high-school senior Luce (Leroy S. Graham), a young black man adopted ten years prior from war-torn Congo by non-black parents (Sarab Kamoo and Ron Williams).
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If the business of Hollywood teaches us anything each spring when many of us hover around the TV set waiting to see if our own tastes match that of the Academy of Motion Pictures on Oscar night, it is that the culture of celebrity is as vacuous and saccharine as the worst cynics make it out to be. That is where Michigan native Mitch Albom comes in with his sharply funny tale about an Oscar-nominated actor who dies the night before the night of the red carpet.
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Art is amusing; great art is provocative. Consider the works of playwright Henrik Ibsen, citizen of Norway by birth and citizen of the world by choice. In his time, that being the turn of the 20th century, he was an artistic renegade, challenging the social norms of La Belle Epoque. He is considered one of the fathers of modern drama, writing plays about the little lives of insignificant people. He can also be a crashing bore. Leave it to Slipstream Theatre Initiative and artistic director Bailey Boudreau to come up with a reimagined staging of Ibsen's "A Doll’s House" that's entirely unique.
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